A great brand position, brand promise or even strategy that sits in a deck without being used is 100% worthless. So while thinking strategically is a great start, you need to activate the brand in order to see your employer brand’s value. While we’ve talked about specific channels and media before, we’ve never thought through […]

While I’m a big believer and proponent of opening the doors to let everyone find frustration and satisfaction at work, as a middle-ages white guy, I always feel out of my depth. Luckily, I know a guy who lives and breathes diversity. We have yet another rambling conversation on what its going to take to […]

Haven’t we been doing this recruiting thing for a LONG time already? Does it feel like we’re not really getting any better at it, that we’re all throwing up our hands and giving up that things can be better. And if we look at recruiters and sourcers and HRBPs and hiring managers as independent actors […]

Today, we try a little experiment and talk to my friend and recruitment marketing genius Tracey Parsons. Topics covered along the way: why doesn’t the business work well with recruiting, creating surprise and delight in candidates and just how low the bar is t0 making most candidates thrilled to apply. If you enjoyed this “experiment,” […]

How do you define “strategy?” Go ahead. I’ll wait. It’s a lot harder than you might expect. Now take the definition and see how it fits as your employer brand strategy. A little awkward? Here’s the deal: it’s very rare that any of us are taught “strategy” as a concept, and yet our jobs depend […]

It’s so much easier to work on and with the things we control. But… that’s pretty limiting, isn’t it? Especially in our jobs where we control almost nothing at all. If you want to succeed as an employer brand or recruitment marketing pro, the smart move is to ignore the things we control and focus […]

If your employer brand is the perception someone has about what it must be like to work there. where does that perception come from? More to the point, what can we do to influence and shape that perception? The answer isn’t a campaign or a project, tool or seminar. The answer is in building great […]

Freshly back from Talent Brand Summit an 100+ employer brand pros, I was struck by how much we talk of tactics, strategies, optimizations, tools and metrics, but very very very little about emotions. But people won’t do anything until they feel something. So let’s start talking about eliciting and sparking emotions in candidates. Show Notes […]

How much time do you think you spend on the tools you and your team use to source and recruit? Add in vendor demos and evaluation trials and internal conversations (not to mention budget conversations) and it adds up. But how often have those tools worked out? How often have they delivered the promised results? […]

Your custom-designed and unique-to-you recruiting process that you developed is 99.995% the same as everyone else’s. When you do everything the same, you attract people who know how to pretend to be the same. Not only does that make it near impossible to understand what makes a candidate different, it also tells the world that […]

Your Employer Brand Is Your Reflection

REI announced Monday that it would be closed Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving when stores roll out major discounts and open early to jumpstart holiday sales).

REI, a store focused on camping and other outdoor activities, asked their employees to spend that day outside in a press release that was echoed across social and “standard” media.

In standing up for who they were and what they believed in, REI potentially lost out on millions of dollars in gift-related revenue. But at the same time, they defined who they were, not just to consumers, but in relation to the competition, and to their employees. Oh, and they also got millions in free advertising, which is a nice bonus.

This is the same thing CVS did when it announced it would stop selling cigarettes. Or when Walmart increased hourly wages.

So the next time you wonder, “What can we do to enhance our employer brand?” you should really be asking, “Are we really different? And if so, how? And how do we make that difference clear to everyone?”

Your employer brand is your reflection. But instead of spending your time polishing the mirror, focus on what that mirror is reflecting.